It may seem that from a science thus occupied and concerned mainly with the infinitely little, the romance of the early days of exploration has departed; but this is to misunderstand the situation. The explorer’s work was never romantic in the sense in which the average man understands the word. The idea of the excavator as a man who spends his days in exploring wonderful underground chambers filled with the treasures of the past, is just about as true as the picture of the great detective who is always unravelling the mysteries of crime by the most amazing strokes of genius, and landing himself incidentally in the most appalling situations. There never was such an explorer, or such a detective; and the life of the one as of the other is mainly one of monotonous drudgery at which most of the folk who talk about romance would shudder. The great thrilling moments, when a discovery which will excite the imagination of the world is made, have always been far between, and the finding of Tutankhamen’s tomb has shown that they may still come to the modern explorer just as richly as to his predecessor. But the true romance of modern excavation lies in this, not that it can reveal the dead monarchs of thirty centuries back in all their splendour, but that by its patient piecing together of innumerable small details it can give back to us the actual life of the period in which the dead monarch lived, and let us see the order of his court, and what is far more important to our knowledge of the past, the traffic of the market-place in his cities, and the intercourse of his land with the nations around it. It is scarcely too much to say that because of the minute care with which the modern excavator has treated the minutest fragments of the relics of ancient days we are better acquainted with the life of the Egypt of the New Empire than we are with that of the ordinary European nation of the Dark Ages, though the latter be more than two millenniums nearer us in time. A science which can accomplish such a miracle of resurrection can never lack the element of true romance in the eyes of anyone who has a real sense of the wonder of life.